keep my content in a repository all by itself, in a simple markdown format.

support a responsive design based on a popular framework rather than create custom themes based on the blog framework.

generate the website on the fly from the markdown files, and not from a "static website generator" nor a database.

It's intentionally built on small and specific node.js modules with the idea that others can take those components and roll their own blog as well. Some components I built myself, and others are existing ones from the node community.

The primary configuration and blog content are in their own Git repository, written in Markdown with YAML Front-Matter (yfm). The blog itself is in another Git repository -- it's largely data driven from the config file.

This borrows from Octopress and Hexo (having a config and yfm content), but differs in that mine is split into two separate repositories -- content is separate from the blog code and design itself.

Also, Octopress and Hexo are static site generators. Mine grabs all content from the Git repo and caches that. This allows me to contribute content to my site without having to rebuild it manually each time and push the built version.

Why another blog solution?

I enjoyed Octopress, and started porting to Hexo, but I really just want to have my content in a repo that is separate from the blog code and design itself. I also wanted to use presentation libraries directly like Zurb's Foundation, rather than learn a specific theme framework for the static generator.

This has led to developing the bitesize JavaScript library, which won't generate a static site, but will source the blog markdown content from a GitHub repo.

The problem I ran into was that the Parse.com promise library handles error-handling differently than the Promises/A+ spec (instead it follows jQuery's implementation) so then started trying to create a mock of a Parse.com promise, but this was a bit tricky and I wasn't happy with result.

Then I finally had the thought to replace the Parse.com promise implementation with Q. That way I could implement my Cloud Code with Q and also write my tests with Q.

Here's an initial experiment of using Q with Parse.com Cloud Code.

How to run: I just created a new Cloud Code project with the Parse command-line tool parse new and then grabbed q.js via an npm install q and copied q.js into the ./cloud directory.